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This is the rub. Most people don't have the time or the patience to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia's byzantine network of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices, all of which are referred to exclusively in jargon and wielded as weapons to revert or block even good-faith edits. Editors especially on influential articles are basically lawyers in all but name, and the result of trying to work against their interests is the same as someone with no legal training trying to out-lawyer a lawyer. With enough self-education and persistence, you might have a chance. Otherwise, it's hopeless. But of course, to those on the inside, with the arcane knowledge and the community recognition, it seems so easy! Practically effortless!
Most people inclined to contribute would have no idea what to do if their change was reverted, and either give up at that point or just change it back.
There's some truth to this, but I don't think the community is as uniformly nasty as you're making it out to be. There are plenty of editors who will patiently try to point you toward relevant policy or help you through a point of misunderstanding. (See, for example, the saintly editors who answer newbie questions at "The Teahouse".)
Also, while I would never admit to holding this opinion in an on-wiki discussion, I secretly think that the relatively high barrier for entry to making non-trivial contributions to Wikipedia is actually a crucial ingredient to its success, in that it filters out would-be editors who are insufficiently smart or diligent. This is why I cringe a little every time Wikimedia developers try to roll out more glossy, simplified, WYSIWYG interfaces. I'm not sure I want more people coming in to the project who aren't smart enough to use wikitext (the markup language that constitutes the "source code" of all articles and discussion pages).
As it is, Wikipedia kind of does feel like a community of scholars. But the more accessible it becomes, the more it's going to come to resemble the YouTube comments section of yore. Case in point, a while back the WMF did an experiment where they actively solicited feedback from readers of Wikipedia articles. Their theory was that Wikipedia needs more voices (and this continues to be an overarching theme of their work), and that a) this user feedback would help existing editors identify areas for improvement for articles, and b) users who are induced to leave feedback can also be induced to go fix the problems they identified, and thus graduate from reader to editor. The experiment was a failure, because the signal to noise ratio of the reader comments was pretty abysmal. You can actually still download a dataset of some of this feedback and it's pretty funny to read. Here's a random sample of comments on the article "Apple Inc.":
(Reminder that there are a lot of sub-100 IQ people out in the world, but you probably don't have much interaction with them because you exist in a bubble of above-average intelligence friends, family members, and coworkers.)
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There's also the sneaking suspicion that the layers of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices are just window-dressing disguising outright bias. If for any given issue a wiki-lawyer can use the policies (etc) in different ways to come to opposite conclusions, that's exactly what's going on.
I used to see a lot of this 'rules lawyering' back when I played Dungeons & Dragons as a teen, and from reading the discussion page it seems that the exact same personality types are still at it.
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This reminds me of debates I've had in the past with religious (Jewish) people, after they found out I was a non-believer. I used to try to show them some contradiction within the bible, or how something in it is just factually incorrect, and the reply would be some reference to the Talmud or whatever that supposedly resolves the issue. I've learned not to try to beat people at their own games - it's their lives, I will never beat them at it. They're still wrong, but surrendering frame is not the right way to go about it.
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